The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Bill Trimmer:

While I never fight in the SCA (armor, heat, bashing each other over the head with unfinished pieces of lawn furniture), the wrong change in Pennsic rules would change What I Do on My Summer Vacation, so I looked it up. And what the SCA is proposing is buying reusable hydration bottles and racks for general use in order to cut down on transmission of communicable disease (hepatitis, herpes, more interesting stuff) rather than relying on everyone knowing whether or not that funny feeling in the lips, throat, whatever, is something to worry about. A good use of some cut of what I pay for Pennisc every year, I'd say. Although, I do wonder how many non-contact squeeze bottles will get lost in the shuffle during War this year.

I'm looking at the responses here and I think I'm missing a bit of information. What format is the original manuscript in? I spend a good chunk of my on-duty time converting résumés into something readable by MS Access, so I do a lot of text stripping and flipping and reformatting. Is the manuscript file originally a .doc file or is it a .txt file? If a text file, you're in trouble, since there's no formatting in the original. If a .doc file, the search/replace is cool, followed by resaving the file in text format. One other thing to consider is what program is importing your text file and if it differentiates between Word text files and DOS text files, because they are ever so slightly different, and Word lacks a DOS text save option. "Plain Text," is NOT DOS text; I found this out the hard way. End of file characters have caused me no end of headaches at work, and most of what I've been doing is converting .doc files for database usage. Thanks to Joel Spolsky for setting me straight about the nonexistence of "simple" text.

May as well be hung for a goat as a sheep:

How much will people stand for? In 1972 the North Vietnamese and the Chinese made it public that Richard Nixon had kept the Vietnam War going for an extra four years as a reelection stunt. No one complained. No one arrested Mr. Nixon, nor brought him to trial as a war criminal. In 1980 the pres reported that Reagan and Bush Sr. had made an agreement to seel arms to Iran, a country that had declared war on the United States, so long as Iran held U.S. citizens hostage until after the Republican team had won the presidential election of 1980. No outrage came from the public. With the example of a war criminal and two traitors to follow, what did the public expect from a son of one of the traitors?

I'm tired of being polite about this stuff, and it is almost certainly way too late to do anything about it in the United States. As far back as Nixon's resignation I can recall classmates of mine remarking that Nixon's only real crime was being caught.

What are any of us going to do about this?

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